StevenClark.com.auhttp://www.stevenclark.com.au
The weblog of Steven ClarkSat, 19 Jan 2019 21:39:33 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.12My Biggest Beer Brewing Lessons from 2018http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Stevenclarkcomau/~3/c4M_YzhY2nc/
Wed, 09 Jan 2019 05:13:05 +0000http://www.stevenclark.com.au/?p=6454For about a decade I’ve been brewing various concoctions from mead to cider and fruit wine (and, yes, beer extract and wort kits). About a year ago, I received a grain mill for Christmas from my generous and loving partner and I almost immediately bought a BIAB (Brew in a Bag) set up for my move into all grain brewing. This year I have learned that making consistently good beer has it’s challenges.

Some 2018 Beer Lessons Worth Heeding

Beyond the rudimentary truth of obsessive cleaning and sanitisation of all brewing equipment the biggest tip I’d give anybody starting out is to ramp up the temperature of the brewing beer right at the end of secondary fermentation. Just when that airlock appears to be slowing right down to nothing. Why? Well, the yeast is struggling. Simple. It’s been making some heat of it’s own during fermentation and as it gets sleepier it therefore gets a little colder. And you need it not to go to sleep before it finishes the job of cleaning up all the bad stuff.

To that end, I have an electric blanket that helps just ramp the beer up a little right at the end. Makes a lot of difference to the final product. If you’ve got money for temperature control I’d highly recommend going down that road.

The second biggest thing I learned was not to sweat the details. OK so you don’t hit a number, your efficiency is lower (or higher), there’s no need to panic. Slow down, enjoy the process, you’ll still get a decent beer. Just not the planned beer, perhaps. I used to run around like a maniac; after 13 BIAB brews I’m slowing down and enjoying the beer.

A third was moving to liquid yeast starters and making my own yeast bank. I now make a double starter and save one (if required), rather than washing and re-using yeast from the fermenter, or buying completely new yeast. And healthy yeast appropriate to the style makes the beer better. You get different beers from the different yeasts available (multiplied by variant temperatures, of course). So to sum up the yeast issue… I make it rather than buy it and I use and re-use the best available to me, as appropriate.

I think those three things define my progress in brewing for 2018.

Oh, I forgot to mention that I will move into kegging by the end of this year. I’ve had too many years of washing those bottles. I’ve almost hit peak scrub-a-dub-dub.

Brewing Books and Podcasts worth your Attention

One of the great things about brewing beer is you can get by with a little knowledge. Or, you can learn a little science and study a little of the art of brewing and try to make really good beer consistently. That last word is probably key.

There are a short list of beer brewing books that I came by in the last 12 months:

]]>http://www.stevenclark.com.au/2019/01/09/my-biggest-beer-brewing-lessons-from-2018/My Younger Sister is a Nasty Piece of Workhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Stevenclarkcomau/~3/puAdRgBYFEM/
Thu, 20 Dec 2018 06:08:54 +0000http://www.stevenclark.com.au/?p=6489I got some unsolicited vile diatribe in a series of 18 emails from my long estranged younger sister sent on Sunday night (continuing on Thursday and beyond into mid-January with continued stalking behaviour on social media) and the fact that she is suffering severe depression due to her own life choices, is a concern. The woman has devolved into some mad rant about shame and my being an ex-con and all the blitherings of a school child looking to throw arrows at anything that might stick. My sexuality, my finances, my family’s organisational structure, my mental health, my pension, my running away as a schoolboy in the late 1970s, no less.

First. Yes, I’m an ex-convict and served a sentence for murder. Completely true. Yes, I receive a part Disability Support (like about 800,000 other Australians). But it’s more correct to say I am the man frau in a single income family (and, yes, we pay our taxes 52 weeks of the year like the rest of you, not that it’s anybody’s business). I also spent 10 years at TAFE and University and have qualifications coming out my arse – an MBA(Spec), a BComp, IT Certifications at Certificate 4. I’m literate, educated and love to make booze. Yes, I have a Twitter account that posts retro nude photographs and often includes vintage pornography. I’m a photographer and have an historic interest in these areas… read my blog closely, or go to my website. All that is true. If nude bodies offend you, I suggest you do not go there to look. Or blame me for your offended sensibilities if you do. And it’s probably true that I’m the shame of my family. But, seriously, why would I have a blog to rant on the Internet if I was ashamed of my name or my past? I’m not ashamed – look at the domain name. Perhaps the question is whether it’s justified to be ashamed of me, a 54 year old man enjoying my own life? Someone you DO NOT know. Who doesn’t like you back.

Second. This is important. She is one hell of a nasty little bitch and we all know it. She inevitably turns on you like a cut snake and much like my late father would do anything, say anything, sabotage anything to destroy her perceived enemies. And I am that perceived enemy. Why? Well, we’re estranged for a decade and that shits her to merry tears – I took the piss out of her, played with her head to make sure she’d stop trying to be my sister, handed her the cowbell to ring all around the World with some story about her ultimate desirability as a woman and fucked her off. Because she was never going to get into my life with that shit in her head. I think she topped it off in a manic state by using my mother’s phone to send me texts that stated other members of my extended family had discussed the situation and I was dead to them, too. That’s why she’s estranged from others in that family. No matter what my younger sister extrapolates, invents or contrives in her under-educated brain to create a story. She has been dead to me for many years. For several years before that incident, to be honest. Seriously, cross a certain line (more than once, in fact) and we’re done. That bridge is well washed away. All I am hearing is boo-the-fucking-hoo… I ruined the Universe. Simple. Fuck off; when you get there fuck off again. Rinse. Repeat. Die of old age. I don’t care for the woman whether she lives or dies. She’s NOT my family.

Third. Church going non-swearing ‘good person’, my arse. How about that dole fraud I helped get her out of a prison sentence for because I knew a lawyer through my personal past that would fight for her. And that lawyer hated my sister’s guts, because she just kept trying to lie about it instead of copping it on the chin. To my younger sister it’s all a scam. A pretence. Even when the damning evidence was in front of her there was a constant list of excuses and denials like a desperate rat in a cage. And I’d suggest that psychopaths mimic the people around them, so when she’s in a room of nice Christians who don’t swear… guess what she believes is her real persona? She is an empty vessel. I pose that as a question, rather than an affirmation. But it does fit well to my hypothesis. I was over her abusive emails and stalking behaviour long before the 18th revolting never-ending tome of brain vomit (all but 2 are huge, angry bile that reflects her actual soul). That’s enough, thank you. I don’t like her back, a fact. The creepiest are where she now assumes some right of connection or relationship that I can assure you DOES NOT exist in reality. My skin crawls reading them. Attempts to control me through monitoring.

Fourth. Where the fuck does this girl get off saying that I told her she was the reason I went to prison when she was 10 years old? That’s where you slip a lie into your story one too many times and start believing it yourself, I’d suggest. And what the fuck would a 10 year old have to do with my committing a major crime on people she never knew? She was in Grade 5. More likely, my younger sister has tried to link herself to a notable event in the town to backstory her own existence and conflate her part around it; an attempt at piggybacking on the grief of the actual victims of that crime. She was a child in bed three miles away unaware that an event happened. Smacks of crazy? Certainly, false memory. The fact she writes that shit at me means she believes every word that she says. Complete and utter delusion. Nobody asks ‘WHY’?? And God help us what that will elicit. It was entirely unrelated to her existence before and during the fact. Possibly, this is the problem. Irrelevance. Invisibility. She is a nobody in a small town.

She tried to do that same attachment five years ago when somebody in my life, along with his partner and unborn baby due to be born that week, died in the Westgate Mall Massacre in Kenya. And, after being silently rebuffed by me on Facebook with a rapid account block (because I saw her swanning on about the death on her timeline like it made her important – she DID NOT know him), the immediate and absolute vitriol she direct messaged me, from an account using her child’s name, about that man’s death when it happened was disgusting, to say the least. Who the fuck does that shit? It’s purely venomous evil; a bloody shameful trait to have… and she calls me a parasite. How disrespectful of that man’s mother and family who were grieving. And of me. Callous. Unforgivable.

And, yes, 35 years ago I had a drug alcohol problem. True. A badge of honour, I survived. But only 20 years ago as I left prison her and her husband were growing pounds and pounds of weed in their shed (and got busted) because her husband had to pay his speed debt back to the bikers. And given the cops gave their hydroponic grow lights back and nobody faced serious conviction in the end (beyond confiscation of the weed and $2,000 cash off the kitchen table)… dog. I remember her grubby greedy hands in a hole behind a skirting board in her house trying go get her husband’s drug money out so she could take me shopping in Launceston. So I don’t get her fixation that somehow in the early 1980s I was a drug dealer. First, I actually wasn’t… second, I was very good friends with dealers. Third, so What?!

I mean, seriously, this woman works as a teacher’s aide at the local Catholic school? The same girl dismissed under a cloud from a local old people’s home for mistreatment of people in care? The girl who has an endless list of family nastiness, lies and malicious vendettas – she really is an empty vessel. The same girl who has burned and lied her way through that town to the point she is now a lonely, sad and bitter island of emptiness sending vile emails to her estranged ex-con brother solely because she’d been actively stalking social media for ammunition to inflame Christmas… lucky her, finding something to take out of context for her own diabolical ends (just like our father would have if he hated somebody). I loved my dad, but he could be a toxic bastard.

Some of you might have wondered why I have nothing to do with the toxic cow. Every so many years she crashes and burns. It’s called mental illness. Clinical depression. It’s hard to live with for everybody, but I’m over it. And I’d suggest at least a degree of psychopathy might be under the hood. There is absolutely nothing wrong with all of that, but it needs professional mental services at some point. Currently, she’s flaring. What comes next, postal? And what does “yes I am bitter.. and one day.. I will see your face.. and you (sic) dred that day and I will be a 10000000 times the worst nightmare you have ever seen” … I mean, seriously, what does that even mean in an unsolicited email from a stalker? Should I call the Police today? I haven’t spoken to the woman for nearly a decade!

Five years ago my mother phoned me in the middle of the day to tell me that my sister’s husband was coming to Hobart to bash my head in. I mean, what the living fuck is wrong with these people? Stop that shit right now.

The only shame my younger sister should have is for her own life choices and behaviour… including that last series of unsolicited emails and the vile crap she wrote in them. Taking some credit for a murder she wasn’t even old enough to know happened until after the fact, simply by way of blood relation… despicable. And if you care for her get her counselling, at the least. She sounds dangerous.

The fact that she went 200 posts into my (retro nude / porn) Twitter account stalking (as she now appears to do constantly) and found a throwaway comment (a Twitter gasp! moment) related to my conversation on the phone with my mother that day… well, that’s worrying. Just happened to be strolling past on the Internet? Sure. The fact she threw that rather small thing out of context into the World at Christmas and has sent that vile tirade continuing for over three weeks now… I have to ask why she’s still a teacher’s aide? She is in obvious crisis. And I think my family can keep her. They all need to stay away from this point forward. I am doing very well myself, thank you. And goodbye.

I gave my mother $20 in a card for Christmas. My little sister took her this plate of dog shit, spun it to her own diabolical ends and lost her contact with her youngest son for the rest of her life. Now, that is NOT what nice people do. And who the hell is Morty in all this? Is Morty famous? I’d shut up Morty. It’s not your business.

I have not been handed a single cent from my mother or father since 1998. And that money was in a bank account for me by 1985 for my future release from prison. For the record. Who is the parasite?

]]>http://www.stevenclark.com.au/2018/12/20/my-younger-sister-is-a-nasty-piece-of-work/The Lovely Atrium Nudes of Jules Richardhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Stevenclarkcomau/~3/dMTazmxOPPo/
Mon, 17 Dec 2018 04:39:57 +0000http://www.stevenclark.com.au/?p=6318One of the more interesting photographers of the 19th and early 20th Century was a guy named Jules Richard (aka Julius Richard, Mohammed Reza, Riza Khan Richard, Richard Khan, Mirza Riza and Riza Kahn). The son of a French industrialist and the inheritor of his father’s struggling business, Jules Richard was, for example, the first Western photographer to work in the Persian court of Naser al-Din Shah (1831-1896). He changed his name when he converted to Islam.

Jules Richard was the inventor of the Verascope in 1893, a small three dimensional capture camera that allowed for easier stereo photography. His interest in women and photography led to a huge number of photographs being produced both by himself and hired photographers.

My personal interest in the work of Jules Richard focuses mainly around those beautiful Atrium photographs of young nude ladies enjoying what appears to be an idyllic Summer holiday. He built the Atrium near his house in Paris. The models came from all walks of life depending on who caught his eye. As for his lovers, he was said to have taken many; he was shameless in how he was perceived by civil society. These Atrium nudes attest to that complicated human being.

I don’t know what else I can write about those photographs except to hope you hunt them out yourselves. They are quite something. Jules Richard is said to have owned around 300,000 stereographs, including 60,000 different Verascope glass views listed in 1914.

]]>http://www.stevenclark.com.au/2018/12/17/the-lovely-atrium-nudes-of-jules-richard/One More Brew in a Bag Before Christmashttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Stevenclarkcomau/~3/0Nm4NROv5b4/
Fri, 07 Dec 2018 02:19:50 +0000http://www.stevenclark.com.au/?p=6308A few weeks ago I brewed 46 litres of Oatmeal Stout based on the recipe on page 169 of Brewing Classic Styles by Jamil Zainasheff and John J. Palmer. That beer is downstairs and I’ll bottle half of it next week and the rest on the following week. Mostly because I’m kind of lazy. One half received a Gigayeast Norcal Ale #5 starter and the other got a seasonal release Whitelabs WLP006 Bedford British Ale starter. The first bottles will be cracked for Christmas at an expected ABV above 5 per cent.

In the meantime the plan is sometime before Christmas to do another (46 litre) iteration of my British Golden Ale. This is a style I enjoy drinking because it’s a light and clean, easy to drink, sessionable thirst quenching beer; but, as is the want of someone who doesn’t like black boxes, it’s a matter of brewing this beer over and over until I nail down the exact beer that I’m looking to create. Half of this beer will receive a Whitelabs WLP023 Burton Ale starter and the rest will get a Whitelabs WLP013 London Ale starter with WLP645 Brettanomyces claussenii in secondary. Experimentation, fine adjustment one element at a time… it’ll get there in the end. This will be my third Golden Ale.

Another thing that I do like about brewing the British Golden Ale is it’s inherent simplicity in the grain bill and hop addition. Some British base malt and torrified wheat pretty much get you there. I’ll add a small amount of acidulated malt for PH adjustment and it’s done. I’ve previously used East Kent Golding hops, but this time around I’m going for Tettnang at 60 minutes and Saaz at the 15 minute mark. I can’t see how that would be anything but delicious.

This year has been a lot about making those 7 and 8 per cent ABV beers that draw you into home brewing. You know… the man’s drinks. Or, at least, the cool drinks. And, don’t get me wrong, there’s a very warm and welcome place for a lovely 7%+ IPA in my glass; slightly less so if it’s fruity and hazy. But I’m drawn to more sessionable beers, the sub-5 per cent ABV easy drinking beers and I’m drawn to British Ales in particular. This will be my year of exploring English Bitter, ESB, English Brown Ale, etcetera. I’ll try a few low ABV Saisons over the Summer in the warmer temperatures.

I guess my favourite home brewed beers of 2018 were the Dusseldorf Altbier and that gorgeously malty Wee Heavy ageing away in bottles downstairs. I do like that Roggenbier chilling in the refrigerator right now for Beer O’Clock… and I’ll redo all three of those in the coming year.

Everyone needs a hobby. A ‘doing thing’. A link to this planet in a physical sense. Reading actual books isn’t a bad one. And you might try analog photography with film cameras and hand processing the film, or even a darkroom. It’s fun. Maybe you could try gardening. In contrast to ‘the Internet’… or ‘electronic entertainment’… or even television. Whatever, give it a go… become a maker of tangible things. Maybe you could learn to cook beautiful cakes. And you will be amazed how it turns around an inclination to depression just having some power over your physical Universe.

And I love beer. Drinking beer, making beer, thinking about beer… I’d probably bathe in beer if it wasn’t sticky, bad for my liver & carcinogenic (there goes the romance in a sentence). And wine. And mead. And cider. Yeah, I know how that sounds. I like booze as a food group. Correct select.

Anyway, brew day number 13 on my NANO Brewery BIAB system is going to be that lovely British Golden Ale. Good Summer drinking

]]>http://www.stevenclark.com.au/2018/12/07/one-more-brew-in-a-bag-before-christmas/The First Year of Brewing All Grain Beerhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Stevenclarkcomau/~3/3cquHfgRvIk/
Wed, 24 Oct 2018 21:59:14 +0000http://www.stevenclark.com.au/?p=6298There are hobbies and then there are hobbies that get your drunk, I guess. I’m a big fan of making slow booze. It creates a different relationship and experience around alcohol in the same way baking a cake is way different than buying something from a bakery. Just be cautious… booze is highly caloric and I hear a little whisper that it might just be a little bad for you.

My hobby of making fermented beverages went a step further this year with (a) the gift of a grain mill last Christmas, and (b) the almost immediate purchase in late January of a 95 litre brew kettle and the other items I needed to produce all grain beer in our back yard. Since then I’ve made ten batches of various beers of varying sizes using a technique called Brew in a Bag.

Brew in a Bag is a method of all grain brewing that only requires a brew kettle and a fine mesh bag pegged inside the pot for mashing in the grain. Mashing in is just a fancy word for throwing your grain into a specific temperature water where you use a paddle to moosh it all into a porridge. It gets left an hour and voila… remove the bag & the sugar you need to make beer remains in the kettle. You have unboiled wort.

It’s not hard at all to make beer. Even in a big pot with a kick arse burner and a shiny old mash paddle. However, making good beer is a lot harder than you’d think. I’ve learned a lot about the chemistry and processes of making good beer over the last year and at times it’s been challenging. Ten all grain batches through that large pot and I’ve had some lovely beer and some ordinary ones. And it’s hard work to make beer from grain, water, hops and yeast. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.

I’ve made a couple of British Golden Ales, a not so great Stout, Dusseldorf Altbier that I’ll try to make every year, a lot of nice IPA (an Apricot Rye IPA was particularly nice). I did ditch an Old Ale when I should have kept it because I mixed up my Starsan sanitiser spray with another spray bottle… a lesson learned hard. And at the moment I have three beers in production – an Apricot Rye IPA is being bottle conditioned; a Wee Heavy (Scotch Ale) is nearly ready to be bottled; a Roggenbier fermenting in the basement at full steam with a White Labs Hefeweizen yeast. It’s been an interesting year. Somehow I lost weight, too.

My advice to people interested in slow booze, those potential makers amongst us, is to be patient. And curious. It’s not hard to make beer; it’s just hard to make good beer. And over time and with experience and knowledge you’ll realise the good beer is more than a recipe. And it’s fun. There is just something really down to earth about drinking something you crafted with your own hands. There’s a place for beer that magics itself into a bottle at your local hotel, of course. But, man, making it from scratch is the boss.

]]>http://www.stevenclark.com.au/2018/10/24/the-first-year-of-brewing-all-grain-beer/How Randomised Trials won the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Stevenclarkcomau/~3/XopbegFOTd4/
Fri, 13 Jul 2018 05:10:00 +0000http://www.stevenclark.com.au/?p=6258Listening to Karl Kruszelnicki’s Shirtloads of Science podcast episode on June 24, 2018 – titled Randomistas – they’ve won wars, healed the sick and helped us learn revealed an interesting example, in Admiral Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar, as to the value of randomised trials in shaping the World. The interviewee was Andrew Leigh, author of Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Changed Our World.

To set the scene, Andrew Leigh points out that in the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) scurvy caused the vast majority of deaths. A huge 180,000 men died in the British Navy in those seven years and a less impressive couple of thousand were killed in the fighting. Scurvy was that bad.

So what is scurvy? Richard Walter, a chaplain on a 1740s voyage into the Pacific described the symptoms of scurvy as:

skin black as ink, ulcers, difficult respiration, rictus of the limbs, teeth falling out and, perhaps most revolting of all, a strange plethora of gum tissue sprouting out of the mouth, which immediately rotted and lent the victim’s breath an abominable odour.

Britain, however, was fortunate enough to have a surgeon’s mate named James Lind (1716-1794) who decided in 1748 to run a two-week controlled randomised trial on twelve men. It was known that lemon juice cured scurvy, but the medical wisdom of the day dictated it as a problem of the humours (that horseshit about body fluids – blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm).

James Lind gave six proposed cures to the twelve men in pairs – cider, vitriol, vinegar, sea water, oranges and lemons, and nutmeg paste. Oranges and lemons proved to be the most effective in the randomised trial.

Andrew Leigh points to Lind’s randomised trial and Nelson’s position (nearly sixty years later) before the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Admiral Nelson, who had endured scurvy and survived in 1780, approached a larger force of Spanish and French ships off Cape Trafalgar, Spain, on 21 October, 1805. Nelson had at his disposal a Royal Navy regularly ingesting lemon juice (and therefore scurvy free and fighting healthy). Whereas, the Spanish and French navies had no such luxury among their crews.

At the Battle of Trafalgar, Nelson lost 458 dead with a total cost including casualties of 1,666 men. France and Spain suffered a combined 13,781 men killed, wounded and captured. Approximately three thousand prisoners of war drowned in a storm after the battle.

So, Leigh says, where we are taught in history to attribute Nelson’s direct attack tactics as winning the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, Nelson’s victory was due in great part to the healthiness of the Royal Navy. And, Leigh says, we could well be speaking French or Spanish had the battle gone badly for the British.

To be fair, James Lind (1716-1794), Captain James Cook (1728-1779) and a physician named Gilbert Blane (1749-1843) share the praise for bringing an end to scurvy at sea. James Lind identified the cure, but he didn’t understand the cause as a lack of Vitamin C (ascorbic acid). However, Lind’s story illustrates the value of controlled randomised trials in our society and the benefits that accrue from proper scientific study (as opposed to, say, homeopathic or belief-based cures) to solve large real world problems. Let’s tip our hat to Science.

]]>http://www.stevenclark.com.au/2018/07/13/how-randomised-trials-won-the-battle-of-trafalgar-in-1805/Making All Grain Beer with BIAB (Brew in a Bag)http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Stevenclarkcomau/~3/WrJXEMFJx1A/
Mon, 04 Jun 2018 03:37:57 +0000http://www.stevenclark.com.au/?p=6228BIAB (Brew in a Bag) is a relatively cheap entry point for making beer from the rudimentary elements of grain, hops and yeast. Why do that? I can see a lot of people look at the home brewers out there like we’re all crazy – a whole day making booze? No way!

Why do BIAB Brewing?

Well, imagine the difference in taste and quality between a cake you make from a packet (or buy in the supermarket) and a cake you make from carefully sourced fresh quality ingredients at home in an oven where you control the variables of cooking. That’s a large part of the answer right there. Quality.

Another part of the answer is cost. No, it’s not ever going to be cheap to make all grain beer because equipment costs serious money. But BIAB is a way of doing all the things relatively cheaply in one pot. So it’s really not that expensive. Once the equipment arrives it’s going to cost you a few bucks a 700ml bottle. That’s not bad.

Then there’s choice. You can make beers you would probably never afford to buy or might never see in local stores or bars. What beer do you want to try? You can go a little crazy. And, no, I’m not into bog standard tasteless commercial beer so that choice is something that I enjoy making. Choice makes life interesting.

Finally, it’s a challenge. It’s easy to make good enough beer; it’s a little harder to make pretty good beer; and it’s a challenge to make really great beer. There you go, that’s why I’m doing BIAB brewing nowdays.

What is BIAB?

The idea with BIAB brewing is simple. The boil kettle gets filled with a calculated volume of strike water dependent on the grains used in your recipe. When that water reaches a calculated strike temperature, a fine meshed lining bag is placed inside the pot and the crushed recipe grains are added and mashed in (mixed with the water) so there are no dry centred dough balls. In it’s simplest form, the recipe will determine that this mash rest for one hour at a specific temperature. The pot is covered in that hour to retain heat.

The mash is where beer is made. It’s where the sugars are extracted to make your wort. At the end of the hour you can remove the bag and top the kettle to a determined volume of water that accounts for the lost water to grain absorption (you removed wet grain) and evaporation from the upcoming boil.

A standard boil will be 60 minutes. During this time hops and other additions may be added into that same pot and a whole bunch of chemistry goes to work – drawing oils from the hops and adding character to that recipe-dependent sugar mix you spent an hour extracting in the mash.

At the end, the wort is cooled, aerated and put into a sanitised fermenter with added yeast. Several weeks later you bottle some beer. Simple.

BIAB is as Simple as a Pot & Some Other Stuff

To get started with BIAB you just need the basic equipment:

boil pot large enough to mash and boil your desired volume of wort

BIAB bag or large piece of voile you can line and peg inside your kettle

mash paddle to work out any dough balls as you pour in the crushed grain

hop bags / hop balls for additions in the boil

thermometer to properly assess temperature during mash and cooling

fermenter to put your wort into after it’s been cooled

a grain mill is handy, but some brew shops pre-crush grain if you request

There are plenty of BIAB videos on YouTube and no shortage of places to purchase the equipment and ingredients. You can buy a lot of other gear that will make your brewing day easier, but at the beginning you could get by with the bare essentials. You do need to make choices – ie. size of the pot you want to brew in depending on your needs, whether you want a gas or electric solution, and where you set up your equipment for an easier brew day. The BIAB process takes around 4 hours if all goes well… but account for things not always being perfect.

That, my friends, is how I cook my beer at present. In a single pot out in the garden. And it’s kind of fun.

]]>http://www.stevenclark.com.au/2018/06/04/making-all-grain-beer-with-biab-brew-in-a-bag/A Brave Simple Cure for Tasmania’s Housing Crisishttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Stevenclarkcomau/~3/Et0DJFDTn1Q/
Tue, 24 Apr 2018 05:59:15 +0000http://www.stevenclark.com.au/?p=6213Before you even read about the question or the constraints I’ll give it to you here. For free. Start building new affordable housing targeted at the young families who want and need to buy into a property future. There. Was that so hard to digest?

OK, the problem is more complicated. In the short term, people need shelter and security. And we should do that like it was a State emergency; we should be activating our situation room as though a suburb burned to the ground last week and we need to house and feed everybody who lived there. But we won’t. We would, as decent human beings, except consecutive governments have gone down the road of vilifying anybody who is unemployed and/or homeless as burdens in our society. Giving the poor too much of a leg up out of the gutter just won’t happen… too many Tasmanians would complain.

So, while you’ll see a lot of meetings and discussions in the public sector, it will always end in croissants at noon and everybody back to their safe warm office buildings by afternoon tea. Public servants and their masters just don’t care about the homeless. Not enough to fix the problem. However convincing their tears.

Which brings us to the long term problem. And the long term systemic failure of consecutive governments in Tasmania to supply housing. It’s no secret that the public housing sector has failed to keep up with the social need for a place to live. Or that a combination of negative gearing tax legislation and private sector Airbnb increases have pushed the poor out of the housing market. Which pushes the employed down into sub-standard rentals, which pushes those undeserving poor out onto the street.

This is a problem all about scarcity. It’s all about the current value of assets in the portfolios of richer Australians that are allowed to negatively gear. It’s all about a system where the decisions that need to be made – to build more affordable housing and lots of it – are supposed to be made by the people currently profiting from the tax loopholes and scarcity that have already driven up property values.

I’m sorry, but Tasmanians are being taken for a ride on this issue. It won’t be solved and homelessness will rise continuously as the rich get richer and the poor move into transient townships of tents and caravans driven on by the Police.

Here’s the answer Tasmanians deserve to hear from the public sector. Our government needs to release a lot of land into public sector housing. The Housing Department needs to go back to hiring their own builders and tradesmen, go back to public sector apprenticeships and fix that problem, too… and when the houses are built do three critical things:

Target the people who buy the houses as low income, first homebuyers, young families;

Cost plus pricing at no more than 10-15% across the project; and

Let go of the illusion that public infrastructure should act like private profit maximising barons.

Yes, it will drive down house pricing as demand releases. And, no, this affordable housing won’t be available for sale to the rich. It would be a public project. But we’ll be a far better community with more affordable housing. There should be no Tasmanian children sleeping in tents and cars tonight. None. And it’s shameful that when all is said and done (and I add this because tomorrow is ANZAC Day, 2018)… society will expect the sons and daughters of the poor to go die for the values and trade deals of the rich. Again.

Australia is working really well for some people out there. And those people, including our politicians and business leaders, don’t want the status quo to change. Why would they? But Australia is a failed story for more and more people who can’t find work or housing to meet their personal security needs. All I offer is the answer. Houses. And more houses. Stop the bullshitting.

]]>http://www.stevenclark.com.au/2018/04/24/a-brave-simple-cure-for-tasmanias-housing-crisis/Identifying Sloe Berries from Damson Plumshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Stevenclarkcomau/~3/7SBSEsBE7gI/
Wed, 14 Mar 2018 04:58:50 +0000http://www.stevenclark.com.au/?p=6185It’s that time of the year again when everybody (because it’s all joy playing with the cool kids, right?) goes out looking on the highway for sloe berries to exploit their extraordinary tartness as a gin or vodka infusion, or as a jam ingredient. Unfortunately a lot of these people have brought home the equally lovely, but not quite on the money, damson plum. If, after reading this post, you found and used damsons, don’t shoot the messenger.

Sloe Berries are Visually Distinctive

A sloe berry is easy to recognise in that the berry, often covered in that lovely blush, looks remarkably similar to a 5 cent piece sized blueberry in the palm of your hand. When you bite the berry your mouth will dry out instantly. Pucker up. There’s no mistaking it’s power in that regard and once you’ve tasted one sloe berry it will be easy to identify the sloes from damsons in future.

The sloes will generally be found as hedges or along farm fences. Walk up to the plant and look closely at the leaves. These leaves have fine serrated edges on branches that are dark; thus the sloes are found on a plant called the Blackthorn (Prunus spinosa). On the reaching limbs you’ll see (and they can be difficult to spot at first) wooden thorns up to a couple of inches long and a fair way apart. Your chances of being spiked by these thorns rapidly approach zero, so don’t worry.

Damson Plums can be Close Imposters of Sloe Berries

A very similar and often mistaken fruit along roadsides are the lovely blushed and slightly larger damson plum. To the uneducated eye they look just like sloe berries, except side by side they don’t look similar at all. Beyond the blush, that is, and the hedgerow where you might have discovered them.

Damson plums are more the shape of a grape, for example. Side by side the sloe berry is round like a blueberry and the damson is slightly oval like a dark grape. If you taste the damson plum it’s kind of tart, but nothing in the league of the tartness you get from a sloe berry. The vines are similar, but damson plums lack any of those large thorns and the wood isn’t anywhere as dark as a Blackthorn.

I also notice that when being infused into gin or vodka the sloe berries produce a vibrant red pigment; in contrast to the damson plums more plum-like and less vibrant colour infusion. Only a few days ago I saw somebody’s Sloe Gin infusion in a 5 litre glass demijohn and realised those were damson plums, not sloe berries. I kept my mouth shut, of course.

Sloe berries on the left and damson plums on the right (the picture below, although those could well be black bullace on the right due to spherical shape). When the examples are together it’s quite obvious which are the sloe berries. Sloe looks like a blueberry/currant style of fruit; the other looks more like a plum. The sloe berries are as small as a five cent piece. Sloe berries go blacker as they ripen and lose their bloom, ripening from the ends of branches inward. Best to pick them then.

My Adventures with Sloe Berries as Wine and Mead

In my basement there is a 20 litre bucket where I placed 8.8 litres of boiling water over 4.2 kilograms of sloe berries. The bucket is sealed for 2 months and when I open it in early May there should be a thick green carpet of mould. I’ll remove and discard the mould in one piece, of course. But then, after straining the liquid, I’ll use 5 litres to make Sloe Berry Wine. The rest will be added to 5 kilograms of blackberries and about 7 kilograms of honey to make a lovely Sloe & Blackberry Mead.

No, I didn’t have a clue about the difference between sloe berries and damson plums, either. They’re both good, but in many ways different. If you want that real tartness you’ll want to better identify the sloe berries. Good luck

Gatewood photographed Mardi Gras and Naked City on numerous occasions, the San Fransico gay scene, The Hellfire Club, Miss Bald America and Sex Clubs in New York. Through his work with tattooed people he was led into the subculture of body piercing. As he described it, body piercing was a sub-sub-sub culture he only learned about through the subculture of tattoos. In other words, Gatewood discovered previously unimagined underground scenes through photographic documentary of the various layers of American sub culture.

It was a mad crazy World that enthralled Charles Gatewood. The freaks, outcasts; the collective populace outside our idea of “suburban normal”. And that’s exactly why I love his work. Too many photographers refuse to look at the ugly, the unkempt, the discarded and unacceptable.

In a quick biography I have to mention Gatewood’s first commercial photograph sale was for “Dylan in Sunglasses and Cigarette, 1966”. He exhibited internationally and won fellowships and awards. But yada yada, this is all about those photographs of the grit and grime of his sub-sub-sub cultural experiences.

That is what fascinates us. The bizarre. The unusual. The irreverent and unacceptable. That was Charles Gatewood in a nutshell.

It’s sad that Charles Gatewood died in 2016 after an attempted suicide. Always a tragic end to a great life thinking and making meaningful work. If you can get hold of a copy of the 1985 documentary about Charles Gatewood, “Dances Sacred and Profane” then it’s well worth hearing the man discuss his work.